Europe|Rift Emerges Before Vote in Sweden as Immigration Tests a Tradition of Openness

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Rift Emerges Before Vote in Sweden as Immigration Tests a Tradition of Openness

By David Crouch

Sept. 12, 2014

TROLLHATTAN, Sweden — Refugees from Syria and Iraq are pouring into Sweden at a record pace, placing strains on welfare, schools and housing. With national elections imminent, the center-right government is watching some of its supporters desert it for a populist, anti-immigrant alternative.

Were this any other European country, the governing coalition’s leaders might vie to win back voters by toughening their stand on refugees and immigration. But this is Sweden, where the right-leaning prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has decided to gamble re-election on embracing the country’s tradition of openness, in stark contrast to the anti-immigrant sentiment infusing politics across much of Europe.

“I appeal to the Swedish people to open their hearts” to refugees, he said last month in one of the defining moments of the campaign.

Refugees are good for the country, he said. “These are people who come into Swedish society to build it together with us. Together we are building a better Sweden.”

But even in Sweden, the politics of immigration are growing more heated and complex.

The country appears poised to shift leftward in the parliamentary election on Sunday, polls suggest, with a coalition of moderate socialists and Greens consistently ahead of the governing coalition of center-right parties led by Mr. Reinfeldt.

But the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, who have roots in the extreme right, are running strongly enough in pre-election polls that they could win 10 percent of the vote and almost double their seats in Parliament. An unconvincing victory by the left-leaning coalition could leave the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam nationalists of the Sweden Democrats holding the balance of power in Parliament.

After the prime minister’s embrace of the value of immigration, the Sweden Democrats seized on his admission that the short-term costs of welcoming refugees were so “huge” that they ruled out major new investment in welfare.

Mr. Reinfeldt’s move put the issue squarely at the center of the election and made it a test of the boundaries of Swedish tolerance.

“We don’t know of any other country in Europe saying we should not be scared of immigration,” said Sophia Metelius, an adviser to the government on immigration policy. “Most have moved the political map in the direction of the far right.”

In Norway, the populist Progress Party entered a coalition with the center-right conservatives this year; Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right terrorist who killed 77 people there in 2011, was once a member of the Progress Party. The new government moved swiftly to ban what one Progress Party member and government official characterized to The Financial Times as “the flow of beggars from outside Norway.”

In Denmark, Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbor to the south, support from the far right People’s Party kept a minority coalition in power for the first decade of this century, extracting major concessions on immigration policy as a result. At elections to the European Parliament in May, the far-right party took more than a quarter of the vote.

Sweden has not seen such a high number of people claiming asylum since 1992, when the country received nearly 60,000 Kosovar Albanians fleeing war in Yugoslavia. This year, about 80,000 people will claim asylum here, up from the 54,000 who came in 2013. As a result, 15 percent of Sweden’s population today was born abroad.

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Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has urged Swedes to welcome refugees. The center-right government has lost some supporters to an anti-immigrant alternative ahead of Sunday’s 9/14 elections.CreditJonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Surveys show around half the population thinks that refugee numbers should be reduced, said Anders Sannerstedt, a specialist on immigration at the University of Lund. A poll last month suggested that only a quarter wanted to see more refugees come to Sweden, although two-thirds say they support the government’s migration policy.

But there is also evidence that the unity of the main political parties on this issue has helped to hold anti-immigrant feeling in check. Parties of left and right have erected a ring of sorts around the Sweden Democrats, treating them as political pariahs and refusing cooperation in Parliament.

When a center-right politician wrote an opinion piece last month on the need to discuss a limit on refugee numbers, her party leadership said they felt “sick” and “ashamed” of her “pitiful” article. Politicians and the media dumped a truckload of scorn on a governing party lawmaker who proposed a ban on street begging last month. She had “made the mistake of listening to her constituents,” one of her few supporters, the mayor of Vaxjo, Bo Frank, wrote on his blog.

There is no evidence that opinion has shifted toward the Sweden Democrats since Mr. Reinfeldt’s speech, and social media discussion this week has been buzzing with revelations about racist comments on chat forums by far-right candidates, one of whom was photographed wearing a swastika armband. But as Election Day nears, divisions between the main parties have emerged.

The center-left Social Democrats, front-runners for the premiership, contend that Mr. Reinfeldt, even as he embraced the principle of welcoming immigrants, made a calculated gift to the far right by highlighting the cost of integrating refugees. They say his government is preparing to cling to power with the Sweden Democrats’ support.

Mr. Reinfeldt’s colleagues counter that he was simply scoring a point against the left’s promises of generous public spending. Gustav Fridolin, the Green Party leader and potential coalition partner with the Social Democrats, said he was “proud to live in a country where a center-right party during an election campaign asks for solidarity when the world is burning.”

Boel Godner, the mayor of Sodertalje, a town near Stockholm that has taken in thousands of people fleeing Iraq and where half the population has a foreign background, complained that her municipality received no additional funding from the national government, while wealthy towns received very few refugees. “We need to do more than open our hearts, it is not a solution in itself,” she said.

The Integration Ministry said financial support for towns receiving refugees was recalculated this year to make it fairer.

In Trollhattan, a town of 50,000 people near Sweden’s second city, Goteborg, almost one in four people has an immigrant background. At 13.9 percent, unemployment here is nearly twice the national average, not helped by the bankruptcy in 2011 of Saab, a premium auto manufacturer, that threw thousands of people out of work.

Listening to a Sweden Democrat rally in a park, Kurt-Olof, 72, said he would vote for the party because of an “explosion of people” that was out of control. He worked for 47 years at Saab, losing a finger on the assembly line.

“Refugees come here and get a smorgasbord of benefits,” he said. “They cost too much, and there are too many cultures.”

Immigrants are concentrated in the Kronogarden area, a short ride from the center, making Trollhattan one of the most segregated cities in Sweden.

“I am scared when I go out of this district,” said Ismail, 26, who came to Trollhattan from Eritrea as a toddler, and who like many people interviewed asked that only his first name be used. “When the Sweden Democrats are strong I get more racism on the street.”

Annika Wennerblom, the mayor of Trollhattan, said in an interview that local industry would rely on immigrant labor in the long run because the indigenous population was aging. But in the short term, her municipality needs more financial help from the government to provide schools and housing, and to integrate the new Swedes.

“We say to Fredrik Reinfeldt, ‘Our hearts are open — but you need to open your wallet,’ ” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Rift Emerges Before Vote in Sweden as Immigration Tests a Tradition of Openness. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe